Did you know water is blue. Yeah, that was made very clear in Alberta. For grade 9 my class trip was to Alberta, and it was amazing. Like Oregon we had a book to create. The book included parts of our Maker work and Humanities. For this post I will be focusing on the Maker aspect, and if you want the to see the Humanities part you can check out my other post.

What was your project for Maker?

Our main project for Maker were 4 videos. Our first Video was about what inspirers me, and I used it in the about me part of my book. Then during the trip we had to make the other 3 videos. The video I made on the first day of the trip was a Silent Video. It was a short film that was based around a ghost town at 3 Vally Gap, and it was the most fun to film. The other 2 videos we filmed throughout the whole trip. My least favourite video was the TikTok Style video. It had to have a TikTok trend in it, and I did transitions. Now the biggest and most time consuming video was the Investigative Video. This was my favourite video if you think about all the parts of it. The goal of it was to find out more info about your thesis by interviewing people.

 

What Inspires Me Video

This was the first video I made for this project so I learnt a lot after doing it. I am going to slit it into 2 categories for ease.

Filming for the first video was questionable, and had a big learning curve for me. The biggest mistake I made was not having planned out the shots enough. I ended up just saying I want a video of a pool table and didn’t think about the angle, time of the shot, or how much should be moving in the shot. A smaller mistake I made was not getting enough shots, and that is something I improved a lot at for the next videos. In this video I ended up having to stay on the same video for too long and it made it boring to watch. One thing I did well though was the voice over. I was able to overlay it to match what was being shown on screen. 

Video editing is something I have not done much of in my life. The last time I can remember editing a big video was for the PLP application video. I used IMovie for my editing which did was it had to for this video. The big things I learned or improved on were things like adding text, and making the transitions quick and not abrupt. 

 

Silent Video

For the silent video I didn’t work much on the editing side so most of the things I learnt were about filming and not editing.

Some big things I learnt for filming were angles and where shots could be taken to look like it’s somewhere else. During filming we did lots of low shots that just got the shoes, and one of my favourite shots was one aimed at a door, someone walks out and u just see theirs shoes, then it pans up and someone else walking in and you see their whole body. This video taught me the most about filming.
Most of the editing for this video was done my someone else but that doesn’t mean I didn’t pick up anything. The big things I picked up is when someone isn’t talking, which was this whole video, you should make the music pretty loud so it doesn’t seem empty.

 

TikTok Style Video

The TikTok video was my least favourite but it was the only short form video so it taught me some things the other videos couldn’t.

Filming for the TikTok was the easiest by far. I didn’t need to ask for interviews and permission to film others, or make long clips trying to hold the camera still. The one thing that was made very clear is that for transitions I need to move the camera and almost flick it to make it smooth. Also I needed to work on remembering to film the video in portrait and not landscape.
Editing for this video was the most difficult which might seem strange. The problems I guess technically came from the filming. The problem was that the videos didn’t transition perfectly so the transition wasn’t super smooth. The only way to fix that was to have a fade transition, and it doesn’t look great.

 

Investigative Video

The Investigative Video took the most time to film, edit, and caused the most stress. My best editing I did came from this video which surprised me a lot.

Filming for the Investigative Video was quick but long. The videos I filmed with the pure intention to use on the video was just the interviews which was probably only 4 minutes all in. I only used about 20 seconds of those though and the rest came from other videos I took while in Alberta. This taught me how you don’t need to intentionally get videos for everything, and that you can improvise when you need more clips.

Editing for the Investigative Video was very time consuming. I had to get about 15 minutes of video in and then start to cut it down to the 2 – 3 minute limit. Once I got the videos in I had to make a script that matches with different clips I have. Once I had the script I had to make the voice over itself. Then I had to make the videos transition, add text, credits, and do a few more run throughs to make sure everything was good. All these steps taught me how to manage a multi-step process, question wether something is needed in a video, and figure out the best way to approach a big project.

 

Competency: Questioning 

The Competency we focused on for Maker was Questioning, and it related perfectly to the Investigative Video. The whole point of the Investigative Video was to question wether your thesis was right or wrong. The Competency description is ‘I can share ideas, ask questions, and research information from a variety of sources’ so you can see know how it aligns very well with the investigative video. To fully understand how I have learnt more, and discovered new things about this Competency, I am going to break it up into 2 different sections.

Interviews: The Investigative Video is an amazing example of building questions to ask and communicate ideas. Before we even went to Alberta we had to make questions that were able to communicate our ideas along with getting the interviewees input. When we where in Alberta we then had the conduct the interviews and get out ideas across to them quickly and concisely.

Sharing: The biggest way I showed work was with The Book I made about Alberta, and the work we did there. Through the book I was able to share my videos, explanations about what we did and why, along with explanations about where we went. The Book was the biggest way I showed my work, but not the only way I shared work. The other big way I shared work was with this blog post, along with the Humanities one. They both are able to share the work I did, and what I learnt.

 

Conclusion

The Alberta Trip was better then Oregon and I learnt much more. Purely looking at the information side of the trips, Oregon had more info, but Alberta taught me way more skills. How to interview people, editing videos, filming with different angles, and other things like that are things I rarely did, if at all. My the end of the trip and especially the project, I had in proved a significant amount in all of those areas, and picked up lots of tips and tricks for them.